I can only report on yesterday’s demonstration from the comfort of my home. I’ve been doing some work. Trying to catch up with a lot of stuff that I’ve been neglecting. Like organizing my notes. They’re in a real mess. I had the telly news on and was receiving updates from the #demo2010 and the #DAYX2 Twitter feeds for most of the day. I’ll be there for the next one. The above photograph came from here. It was posted by a ‘concerned citizen’ who stormed “I hope the organisers are going to condemn this”. Others piped in with the usual stuff ranging from “Marxists” to “skagheads”. How imaginative.

This Tweeter who calls himself WatTyler_Thinks describes himself as,

Sceptical, angry, cynical young man, Libertarian, Rants in less than 140 characters

Okay, we get the picture. Wat Tyler as any kid will tell you was the leader of the Peasants Revolt. This guy isn’t a peasant and most certainly isn’t revolting – well not in the revolutionary sense at least. There seems to be no real historical connection with his namesake either. Here’s one of his tweets on #demo2010

Dear Marxists – have you realised the irony of you being in Trafalgar square, an imperial war memorial

Quelle drôle. But I’m willing to bet that he’s overlooked something here. Can you see what it is yet? In fact, he and a couple of others remarked on this ‘wonderful’ monument to British imperialism and demanded that the culprits be transported to the colonies. I always worry when I hear people talk about the Empire and who publicly lament its passing because I know that underneath this sentimentality there lies the beating heart of a fascist.

Television news channels looked very desperate and did all they could to inject some ‘excitement’ into their reportage. BBC News kept talking about the crowds playing “cat and mouse” with the police. Sky repeated the same line with the addition of “there have been several scuffles” adding words like “violence” whenever a bottle was smashed. Eventually the BBC abandoned its rolling coverage and concentrated on the snow. “Let’s go north to our reporter Fiona Trott who’s in Rothbury in Northumberland. What’s the snow like there, Fiona”? Rothbury was where Raoul Moat was holed up before he shot himself. The villagers must have thought “Oh, no, not again”!

This morning there was nary a comment on the protests. BBC Breakfast opted to report on the arrests and the “vandalism” citing the graffiti that was left on Nelson’s Column. I didn’t bother with Sky this morning. BBC Breakfast is bad enough. Today’s newspapers talk about the 155 to 170 arrests (none of them seem to agree on the exact number) as though the protests had suddenly spilled over into the following day. The Bristol Evening Press led with the by now familiar “Non students to blame for trouble”. Apparently the police said,

“BE CAREFUL who you follow” – that is the warning to students from Avon and Somerset police, who said a second mass protest against university fees and spending cuts was disrupted by non-students who were intent on causing chaos.

Chief Inspector Mark Jackson “called for someone from the student body to come forward so they could better co-ordinate what he referred to as a “leaderless protest””. The CI added,

“I think that should be a warning to the students – be careful who you follow because the person you follow isn’t always genuine.”

Yesterday’s protest was set up via a group called Bristol Against Education Cuts, set up on social networking site Facebook.

The Evening Post contacted the group for a comment but had not received a reply last night.

Naturally the Chief Inspector failed to comment on the numbers of police who were seen without their ID numbers. Remind me again, who’s looking for trouble here?

This morning the bloggers at the Telegraph were noticeably quiet. Most unusual. I guess there was no violence to report. That didn’t stop Sky from trying to inject some into the reports. I read one tweet from a Sky reporter who allege that “news crews were being attacked”. It’s likely that if any news crew gets attacked it will be a Sky crew. Of course, no mention was made of this in the news bulletins.